I fully agree about raising good bugs. It is a tremendous accomplishment to build a browser that works as well as the Micob. However I am sure you will agree that any serious discussion must be based on facts and it is a fact that Opera works sometimes better on the N800.

Of course, because - as I said - microb's in beta. Without raising bugs, it won't get better. Getting it better is in everyone's interest as surely Nokia's long-game with microb is to drop Opera and ship microb as standard.

This'd give them a browser they can ship as part of Maemo, rather than just IT OS; a codebase over which they have control and can access; reduced costs and a better-supported browser in terms of sites etc.

As mentioned before Opera lacks AJAX and that (probably) makes working in het Google environment slow and sometimes simply not possible. Here, MicroB is much nicer. It is also a fact that Google docs does not work with Opera and does with Microb - but still too slow.

It's a ~300MHz ARM, it's never going to be quick for the type of interpreted language, network-heavy, NP-complete problems associated with a rich web application.

Opera doesn't "lack" AJAX - it's not a feature which can be compiled in to a browser; it's a concept describing using features such as asynchronous requests, JavaScript and DOM manipulation to enrich a web application. Opera supports this perfectly. The problem is that many of these websites don't support, either through explicit blocking or lack of testing, Opera - primarily due to its lack of market share.

I noted [...] that you are a very strong Mozilla / Firefox advocate.

No, I'm an advocate for good browsers. Currently Firefox is the best, but this is besides the point for this discussion - we're not on desktop PCs, we're on resource-constrained Internet tablets.

I think it is important to note here a typical aspect of beta software: it is optimized for functionality, not speed. Speed comes later after the feature set is closed. I am willing to bet microb will eventually outperform Opera.

Thanks for the info. Won't Gecko 1.9 code be frozen soon and FF 3.0 released around November or December? Is there any reason to think that Mozilla will release another version of microB roughly simultaneously or soon thereafter?